Heavily reducing WSNs' energy consumption by employing hardware-based compression

Abstract

Power consumption is a crucial issue for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The overall energy in the WSN nodes is consumed in three distinct processes: data processing, sensing the surroundings and data transmission. If data compression is applied, the energy consumed for data processing is increased whereas the transmission power consumption is reduced. In this paper we present, for the first time, that one way of significantly reducing the overall energy consumption of a WSN framework is to off-load the compression task to small, very low-cost reconfigurable hardware devices which are connected to the main processor of the WSN nodes. Based on our real-world experiments, this innovative approach can reduce the overall energy consumed by a state-of-the-art WSN by at least 46% and up to 56%! © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.